Allegorical paintings are secondary art when they endeavour to cover more than a moment of time in a single design, or when the allegory is merely a metaphor applying to action. The first variety is rarely seen in modern works, but it was not very uncommon from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, though it was never produced by first-class artists, and seldom indeed by those of the second rank. Quite a number of works of this period, formerly supposed to have an allegorical signification, are now properly identified as rarely represented mythological legends, or historical incidents which have only lately been unearthed,[a] and we may rest assured from internal evidence that many others of the same kind will yet be newly interpreted. A good design cannot be produced from an event in time because the figures in a presumed action must be shown in repose,[b] or else the action appears incongruous and opposed to experience, as when a goddess is overpowered by a personage with the appearance of a human being.[c] In both cases the figures must seem to be falsities. Designs of the first kind can only be properly represented in a sequence of pictures, each indicating a particular action, as in the Marie de' Medici series of Rubens; and those of the second by commonly accepted figures of sacred or mythological history or legend, as where St. Michael and the Dragon typify Good overcoming Evil. [a] Examples are Lorenzo Costa's Cupid Crowning Isabella d'Este, Giorgione's Adrastus and Hypsipyle, and Piero di Cosimo's Marsyas picture. [b] Religion Succoured by Spain, the Prado, Madrid. [c] Lotto's Triumph of Chastity, Rospigliosi Gallery, Rome. It is scarcely necessary to do more than barely refer to the use of metaphor by the painter when the representation of action is involved, as for instance if he should produce a picture of a heaving ship in a storm, to meet the metaphor "As a ship is tossed on a rough sea, so has been the course of my life," though this kind of picture has been occasionally executed, the artist forgetting that it is not the object depicted that is compared, but the action--in the example quoted, the tossing of the ship--which cannot be represented on canvas. Another form of metaphor sometimes used by the painter is that where a comparison of ideas is represented by physical proportions, as in Wiertz's Things of the Present as seen by the Future, in which the things of the present are indicated by liliputian figures on the hand of a woman of life size who represents the future. Needless to say that such designs, of which there are about a dozen in existence, can only suggest distortion, for the smaller figures must appear too small, and the larger ones too great; or if our experience with miniature imitations of the human figure warrants us in regarding the smaller figures as reasonable, then the larger ones must appear as giants of the Brobdingnagian order.